Quick Links

TIDBITS Stella's Cookies the best cookies I've ever tasted. Ginger creams, snickerdoodles, date- and raisin-filled cookies. I can taste them as I write their names and remember their smell as if they were sitting on her Wisconsin kitchen table in front of me. When I would go to Boy M Scout camp, one of the most anticipated events was a box of her cookies. Stella lived 40 miles and another era away in Camp Douglas, a Main Street town with raised, wooden sidewalks and a train station that existed to service the nearby Army staging camp. My sister Mary would stay with Stella, and the two of them would take a Sunday drive to visit me. From across the flat farm field I could see my Methodist maiden greataunt struggling up the long dirt road, carrying a cardboard box tied up with string. The coffer of cookies would be taken immediately to my tent. I'd break the string and splay open the cardboard flaps to reveal a trove of ginger creams with sugar frosting, date-filled cookies, and perfect circles of snickerdoodles rich with butter and cinnamon. Like Midas with his gold, I counted them. Anyone lucky enough to be in the tent could have one, and then the box would be sealed like some confectionery ark. Suffice it to say that they never got stale. Stella was used to cooking for fanners. Once, when I was 86 about five or six, Stella served cookies at breakfast. ''A little something sweet for breakfast," she said. At the tender age of five, this was a revelation. The cookies followed a trencherman's array of eggs, thickly sliced home-cured bacon, toast cut from homemade loaves, and jams from dusty cellar shelves. There was always some kind of pie in the kitchen, too. But I lusted after Like Midas with his gold, I'd count the cookies and then seal them up. the cookies. They were so perfect: one cookie filled your hand. Truth be told, when I made them for the first time as an adult, I made them big enough to fill my now much larger hand. My favorites were the date- ' and raisin-filled cookies. Plainas-the-brown-box-they-came-in brown sugar cookies on the outside, they gave no hint of the rich filling within. With all the dates and raisins, you could almost convince yourself they were actually good for you. My brother Tom was partial to the ginger creams. Redolent "A handful" and "two fingers' worth" were what I got for measurements. "Bake in a hot oven until done" was the extent of the baking directions. But all I could get was an unworkable, sticky batter that of blacks trap molasses, the wouldn't roll out. I added dark ginger cream was the perfect foil for the snowy frosting swiped across the top. If Stella had just made them, the frost- Camp Douglas. ing would still be creamy. If it had been a while, the frosting would have set into a candylike carapace. Whatever its more and more flour until, in frustration, I called Stella, long distance from Manhattan to Now all but deaf, she could only hear me if I shouted. I told her how much flour I had added and asked what I could consistency, Tom would lick do to salvage the mess. and gnaw the frosting off before biting into the cookie. A week later, I received a note in her shaky scrawl. "The The recipes tended to be amount of flour in the original imprecise because they had recipe is 'about 4 cups.' Aunt never been written but rather Em Audley usually made them passed along from generation and she usually got the right to generation, through hours and years of kitchen apprenticeship. When Stella turned 91, I wanted to make sure her y great-aunt Stella, who lived to be 102, made amount. She stirred them with a tablespoon and when she thought it about thick enough, she stood the spoon up in the culinary skills didn't die with dough and it was to tip very her. I asked her for the recipes. Her reaction was a snort of disbelief. For her, baking these cookies was as much second nature as tying shoes. slowly. Experience will teach you about that. That goes slowly, too." -Bo Young, New York, New York • FINE COOKING